It is now common for users of electronic devices to electronically interact with other users and participate in group activities, including chat sessions, instant messaging, collaborative work projects, and multiplayer games. In many such applications, it is possible for users to remain anonymous while participating in groups, thereby reducing any apprehension about participating in sensitive group discussions, offering unconventional ideas, or taking other socially risky actions that the user might not otherwise take if the user's identity were known to everyone in the group. Thus, interaction with other users through such electronic communities and group sessions often enhances both an individual user's and the group's productivity, education, and entertainment.
Unfortunately, however, there is little that a community of users can do on their own to implement and enforce standards of conduct among the participants, to reward participating users for “good behavior,” and penalize users perceived to exhibit “unacceptable behavior,” and/or to choose the users with whom to associate. There are many systems that enable users to fill out electronic surveys about general participation in a group, to request a third party authority that is hosting the electronic group session to take action for or against another user, or to submit written feedback about another user that is used to assign a rating to that other user. The problem with such approaches is that it is very difficult to create an absolute standard of conduct or behavior that will be acceptable to all members of a community. The prior art has attempted to provide some objective approaches to deal with this issue.
For example, a feedback rating system employed by the EBAY™ online auction service enables users to submit and review feedback on trading partners. Every EBAY user has a feedback profile based on comments made by other EBAY users. Each “positive comment” is assigned one positive point, and each “negative comment” is assigned one negative point. The total number of points accumulated in this manner thereby establishes a numerical “reputation” for every EBAY user. EBAY users can review a potential trading partner's feedback profile that includes this numerical reputation, and detailed comments to determine whether to trade with that user. This approach is similar to gathering user feedback to establish a satisfaction rating, such as the number of stars (e.g., from 0 to 5) associated with a product or service, to indicate quality, sales success, customer satisfaction, or some other characteristic. For example, purchasers of a book can submit a satisfaction rating, such as four out of five stars, to the retailer from whom the book was purchased. The retailer can then average all the submissions to provide an overall satisfaction rating of the product. However, providing profiles and ratings still requires each user to decide individually whether to purchase a particular product, trade with a potential partner, or otherwise interact with another user. These systems do not automatically limit or improve the other user's participation in an electronic organization or enable a group of users as a whole to implement and enforce the groups' standards of conduct in regard to the behavior of members of the group.
Currently, to implement some action for or against a user, the third party host of the electronic group must intervene. For example, a user may submit a message to the third party host indicating that another user is violating a term of service or code of conduct established by the third party host. The third party host may then investigate, and take some action based on the investigation. However, third party intervention does not enable a group of users to take any action in an organized way as a community, for or against a user. Furthermore, it is the third party host who establishes the terms of service or code of conduct, not the members of the group. One or more users of the electronic group may send scathing emails to a target user or inundate the target user with electronic traffic in an attempt to disrupt the target user's access to the electronic group. However, these crude methods do not provide any measured sanctions by the community as a whole. Nor is there any way for the electronic group to electronically reward a target user without intervention by a third party. It would thus be desirable to enable the electronic group to maintain their own community standards for behavior, to automatically facilitate enforcement of the community standards in a measured way, and to automatically reward users for exemplary conduct relative to the community standards.